5of 16An airboat travels north along S. Kirkwood Rd. west of Beltway 8 and south of Interstate 10 where homes are inundated with water from the overflowing Buffalo Bayou to the north, Saturday, September 2, 2017, in Houston. Houston mayor Sylvester Turner issued a new mandatory evacuation order Saturday for homes with water in them south of Interstate 10, north of Briar Forest, east of Highway 6 and west of Gessner Rd. As water continues to be released from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs. (Mark Mulligan / Houston Chronicle)Photo: Mark Mulligan, Staff Photographer / Mark Mulligan / Houston Chronicle

8of 16People are help from a rescue boat at the ramp along the east Sam Houston Tollway near Tidwell after being rescued Monday, August 28, 2017. A flotilla of boats arrived in the area to help launching from the highway exit ramp. Much of the area is flooded from rains after Hurricane Harvey. ( Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle)Photo: Melissa Phillip, Staff / Melissa Phillip

11of 16Dickenson evacuees from the flooded area are picked up by a boat and are transferred to the Gulf Grayhound Park in La Marque at Interstate 45 northbound and Hughes Road overpass on Sunday, August 27, 2017, in Dickenson. ( Yi-Chin Lee / Houston Chronicle)Photo: Yi-Chin Lee / Houston Chronicle, HC staff / Yi-Chin Lee

12of 16Natalie Spears, 8, and her brother, Christopher Spears, 9, play basketball in the Humble area motel Thursday, Sept. 7, 2017, where the family is staying after escaping their flooded apartment in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. The family has a hotel voucher from FEMA for temporary lodging through Sept. 25 and they're not sure where they'll go next. ( Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle )Photo: Melissa Phillip, Staff / Houston Chronicle

Four days before Hurricane Harvey flooded Karen Heredia’s home near I-10 and Barker Cypress Road, she had the day off. If she had known her house would flood, she could have evacuated her pets, elevated her possessions and parked her cars out of harm’s way. Instead, she went to the grocery store to pick up hurricane supplies, feeling well-prepared until it was too late. She had to be rescued by the Cajun Navy, along with her husband, two neighbors, three dogs, a cat and a chameleon.

“It was crazy and scary,” she said. “And all that would have been avoided had we had warning.”

An artificial intelligence startup now says it can provide that warning. The company, One Concern, has announced that it can predict whether your block will flood — and if so, by how much — five days in advance of an incoming storm.

Founded by Stanford University graduates, the startup has launched a flood forecasting product called Flood Concern meant to give leaders hyperlocal predictions of where flooding will occur, allowing them to swiftly prepare and respond. High on its roster of potential clients is the Houston area, which lost over a hundred lives and suffered billions in damage last year during Hurricane Harvey.

The startup has begun approaching city officials and leaders in Houston’s private sector about bringing the technology to the region.

“They’re interested in multiple use cases, all the way from planning to responding,” One Concern CEO Ahmed Wani said of the discussions. Texas A&M University has already partnered with One Concern in anticipation of the potential benefits for the region.

“The use of artificial intelligence is potentially a game changer,” said Tony Knap, associate director of A&M’s Superfund Research Center. “It’s a different way of looking at things.”

Artificial intelligence allows computers to look for patterns from past events to predict what will happen in the future. Predictions become more accurate as the system collects more data — the Superfund Research Center is contributing data about hazardous chemicals so that a flood analysis can also understand potential health concerns.

“The aim is to get the prediction correct,” Knap said. “And artificial intelligence is something that we don’t use and they do. So if that can inform the model … it’s good for Houston.”

Others hedged their responses, depending on how well the software actually works.

“I think these things will work out really well if they could prove that any of these tools would truly be something that would help us manage an event,” said Rick Flanagan, who oversees Houston’s disaster planning, response and recovery as the city’s emergency coordinator. “But when we’re working with Mother Nature, it’s a truly strange phenomenon.”

Wani understands the importance of good information during a disaster. When he was a graduate student at Stanford University in 2014, he visited home in Kashmir when a devastating flood struck the region. He remembers spending a week stranded with his family inside their home.

“On the fifth day, the homes started collapsing, and we saw dead bodies floating in the water,” Wani said. He realized that personnel in helicopters overhead had no idea where the need was most pressing.

“Why do we get overwhelmed when there’s a disaster? Why do systems break?” he asked, before answering himself: “They’re using sparse data to make those assessments, and that’s why they’re flawed.” On his return to Stanford, he began using artificial intelligence to predict where aid would be needed.

One Concern models a city’s landscape, from the buildings to the water tables, then trawls public and private records to build a more complete picture. City permits give clues about when a building was last updated, and satellite and drone imagery allow the software to learn what conditions led to flooding in the past. The National Weather Service provides information including how waterlogged the ground may already be, and the United States Geological Survey provides information about how high and fast rivers are flowing.

The software combines that information with data from social media, area demographics, key infrastructural assets and other sources, then uses machine learning to look for patterns. Past flooding patterns are used to predict future flooding. One Concern used flooding from Hurricane Harvey to validate whether the model worked.

The price to license the product is based on the number of people living in the territory it is used for, meaning that it would likely cost millions of dollars for Houston to use the service. Wani said One Concern hoped to find both public and private partners in order to distribute the costs.

“We’re called One Concern because our one concern is saving lives,” he said. “We don’t want pricing to be the barrier.”

Los Angeles, San Francisco and Cupertino already use One Concern’s services for earthquake prediction at a similar rate, according to the company.

One Concern isn’t the only company using artificial intelligence to predict disaster. Google recently rolled out a flood prediction pilot in India, with the more modest goal of predicting flooding one day in advance (that information is then shared through cell phone notifications and Google Search).

A detailed flood analysis would not only allow city leaders to make more informed decisions during a disaster. It would also help a city recover from one storm and prepare for the next. The Houston Housing and Community Development Department recently completed a study of which homes flooded in order to determine where recovery funds will be best spent. Artificial intelligence could do the same, and it has the ability to absorb new data as the built landscape of Houston changes.

Thankfully, a disaster on the scale of what Wani experienced in Kashmir has yet to hit Los Angeles, San Francisco or Cupertino while they’ve employed One Concern. But that also means that the company’s usefulness has yet to be proven in real time.

Eric Berger, a meteorologist whose forecasts on the Space City Weather website drew 1 million page views a day during Hurricane Harvey, said he could imagine artificial intelligence providing realistic worst-case scenarios for incoming storm systems. But he is skeptical of One Concern’s claim that it can predict flooding on a block-by-block basis.

To illustrate his point, he described a storm he was tracking that Tuesday afternoon that would hit Southeast Texas Friday night. Most of the region would likely see 2 to 4 inches of rain, but certain pockets could receive up to 8 — and those pockets would have a chance of flooding.

But where would they be?

“Three days before this heavy rainfall event, we can say this area is ripe for rain,” Berger said. “We could say that Harris County is at a greater risk than Galveston County. But to specify it even on a city-by-city basis is not possible. … There’s not the underlying meteorological data to support it.”